Does m17 eSATA output power?

Quick question: Does the eSATA port on the m17 output power? I'm guessing it doesn't.

I bought one of those 2.5" HD enclosures that has both USB and eSATA interfaces hoping to take advantage of the speed. I plugged in only the eSATA interface from the enclosure to the eSATA port on the m17 and nothing happens. I plug in the USB cable and the drive turns on. It's either a bad enclosure or the m17 doesn't power the eSATA port...with my luck these days I'm guessing it's the latter.

The only way I think I can get it to work is to use the USB cable with two connectors, one for "power" and one for "data". I only connect the power to the enclosure and then hook up the eSATA interface. Kind of ghetto though, right?

 

esata don't have power supply if you want to connect your hard drive get one esata to sata cable from ebay and get the power from usb

 

No, the m17 e sata port is powered. I've been using my ocz throttle with it. All you have to do is install the software from alienware.

 

What software/driver is that? I tried the "e-sata" driver in this driver's thread but it wants to install the 64-bit JMB36X RAID Configurer, which I don't think is what I want.

Thanks for the help!

 

all an e-sata port needs to be "powered" is the combined USB port. Which the M17 has, as does the M17x and M15x. Pretty much all laptops with e-sata have this now

 

There is also a bios setting to allow usb devices to use the remaining power of your notebook even if it is in sleepmode... Just an FYI
Good to keep charging those ipods while away

 

I've still yet to get my WD eSATA MyBook to work with my eSATA port on my M17. Annoying actually, because that's why I spent the extra $$ for the eSATA version.

 

Okay, I'm in the same boat as you are then. GRRR...I wanted the convenience of a 2.5" drive and the speed of eSATA, and just using one cable.

 

I never used my whitebook with a powershare type device (uses both the esata and usb at same time) but I did use the 2 independently without incident

 

Well the WD eSATA MyBook comes with its own power supply. The instruction manual tells you to plug it in to the eSATA port before you boot the computer up (not hot swappable), which I've done, but during boot just after the green progress bar the computer locks at a blank screen for eternity, the hard drive shuts off, and the computer requires a hard reboot with drive unplugged to recover. I've only been able to use it as a USB Drive (10x slower) successfully.

 

you have all the drivers loaded? including that jmicron raid controller? (even though the raid controller is in fact intel...)

 

Yep, I even tried reinstalling it. Still hangs on boot when connected.

 

I had issues when using any external (usb or e-sata) on my whitebook, it would often freeze the system during a long file copy

 

Holy crap, I thought that was just me that had that problem, or at least I blamed my USB stick and drive. Weird...